Supreme Court directs CBSE for common question papers in all languages

The Supreme Court today observed that there should be a common question paper for the medical examination – NEET. Hearing a plea filed by a student over the difficulty level of the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test, the apex court ruled that CBSE, conducting body, has to file an affidavit informing what mechanism they will opt for conducting the exam from next year.

A petition was filed last month by a group of students alleging that the difficulty level of question paper in eight vernacular languages is higher in comparison to English and Hindi. CBSE has already rejected that there were any variations in the question papers in a previous hearing.

The Supreme Court has in a previous hearing sought the data of candidates who cracked the entrance exam in vernacular language. The annexure, submitted by the CBSE, states that in NEET 2017, 100152 aspirants appeared in the exam of which 30817 have qualified. However, only one candidate has managed to score above 600 marks (out of 720) while under 501-600 marks category, 84 students have qualified.

CBSE compared the data with 2013's exam when 21778 medical aspirants appeared in vernacular languages of which only 1 student scored marks under 501-600 while none could register above 601 marks.

NEET 2017 was held on May 7 and candidates appeared in Gujarati, Tamil and Bengali language complained over the difficulty level. Out of 11.35 lakh aspirants, nearly 6.11 lakh candidates have passed the National Eligibility and Entrance Test (NEET) 2017.